Nuts, Levitating Aliens, etc...

I am steadily settling down to my Trivandrum routine. As part of my morning routine, I read a few newspapers (some in the toilet), mostly for entertainment rather than enlightenment. I read the Malayalam papers for local politics and Kerala news and The Hindu and sometimes the Indian Express for national news. Rest of the stuff, I get from the www. The international news coverage in Malayalam newspapers is pathetic - mainly stuff taken off the wire and translated badly - and I generally don't read it. Still, there was one article that caught my eye the other day about Sony recalling Toshiba batteries. It would have been just another news but for the fact that in reality it was Toshiba recalling Sony batteries, similar to what Dell had to do as the Sony batteries were exploding into fireballs. This article had it upside down but who cares. There was a nice picture of a laptop and the chances of somebody in Toshiba reading Malayalam is remote. I was interested in the news because I have a Dell as well as a Toshiba laptop and was worried when they were going to flare up. (The Dell laptop is OK, but I don't know about the Toshiba as I had left it in Japan.)

I mentioned reading in the toilet at the beginning. This has been one of my favourite morning fixations right from childhood days so much so that I had expressly asked the guys who built my house in Trivandrum to build a bookrack in the toilet. They promptly ignored me and built the toilet to their taste - normal, mundane, run-of-the-mill toilet with no bookrack! Then - I apologize for being repetitive - the toilet seat broke. Now, reading in the toilet has become more of a combat sport for me (the seat cover keeps falling on to my back) because of the malfunctioning toilet seat. The sanitary ware industry in India is very advanced, if you believe the ads. They make space-age stuff and that is where the problem is. Because, only levitating aliens from outer space can conceivably s(h)it on it. A human being, weighed down by gravity, would find it really tough. Unless of course, you have had a million tons of dal and channa the previous evening, which could then produce the gazillion joules of thrust necessary to keep you afloat over the toilet bowl. My hunch is that the guys who design and manufacture this stuff either don't $h*t at all or they like it the Indian way (or perhaps it is the great outdoors for them). To be frank, I'm going nuts because of all this $h*t.

Talking of nuts, while reading the news on Hingis whipping Sania at Kolkata in The Hindu one morning, I happened to glance at a sentence in the left-hand column. "Tamil Nadu might have relegated Kerala to the second position in the matter of production of nuts, said N. Ananthan...." Being an MCP (Mallu Chauvinistic Pig), I immediately started worrying. I don't like Kerala to be number two in anything, even if it is in the production of nut cases. Whatever happened to our vaunted social model? When you think of it, Tamil Nadu has a bigger population and it is perfectly natural for them to have more nuts. Still, it was spoiling my morning. Maybe, just maybe, we're producing a better class of nuts. Perhaps quality, not quantity is our motto and we are producing highly literate and better-educated nuts. So, immediately after checking on the Hingis-Sania score line (6-1, 6-0) I shifted my attention to the nuts story. The story, as it turned out, was about coconuts production, but it didn't bring any solace to me. We were number two. And as a small step to address the issue, I'm thinking of planting a few coconut trees.

P.S. Chikungunia update: A homeopathic cure is being prescribed as a preventive medicine. I have also taken it. Hope it works. In the meantime, the government continues to play the blame game. There was a simple measure they could have taken (and it is still not too late to take). That is, exterminating or containing the mosquito menace, but that is not sexy. "The government today decided to kill mosquitoes" doesn't have the same ring to it as, say, "The government today decided to appoint a judicial commission to determine the plight of poor and working-class chikungunias (people who have chicken with mosquitoes as a side dish), with special stress on the health minister's role in communicating communicable diseases more effectively with the help of hospitals, who play a positive role by disposing off their medical waste at various key places in the middle of the night. The government also decided to send a special team comprising of senior officials, doctors and politicians to Western Europe to study the impact of expressways on chikungunias".